of a tapestry of the richest camel's hair shawls. The other is flat painting-the modern methodgayer and brighter, but not so deeply rich and delicate. The former usually surrounds the base of the alcove or apartment; but the latter haunts the depths of the upper walls and the ceiling with suggestions as subtle as the melody of Eastern verse.

The rooms opened into the largest alcove. They were quite empty, and resembled grottoes, with their marble pavements, and mosaics of coloured marble in the wall; and at the farther end a raised dais, spread with lounges where, under the arabesques, and in the sound of the falling water, the women lay in voluptuous repose, crusted with jewels, and completing the Paradise.

CHAPTER IV.

HOURIS.

"The night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away."

SUCH beautiful women we saw !

Not, of course, the Muslim wives, but Hebrews, whose beauty is more imperial.

Many of the finest houses in Damascus are those of Jews, who cling there as they do everywhere else, although they occasionally suffer persecutions of relentless severity. There are about five thousand Jews in Damascus, and they are often the chief financial officers of the Turkish Government. They live in a quarter of the city by themselves, and as we left the shabby street and entered the courts of their houses, those chapters of old romance which relate the hidden luxury of the Hebrews returned to my mind, and were justified.

The best of these houses have two courts, three

alcoves opening upon the inner one. Their romantic beauty can hardly be imparted by any description, nor do I know any pictures which fairly represent it. The Syrian light has not yet been caught upon the palette, and without that, the gorgeousness of the impression is lost.

These fountained and foliaged interiors, hushed in the warm, blue silence of that sky, for ever suggest a luxurious and poetic life. They suggest it so absolutely and strongly, that a child of the West contemplates them, fascinated, indeed, but frightened, as if it were wrong to follow, even in fancy, the outline they draw upon the possibilities of life. Dreaming by the singing waters, or reclining upon the sumptuous divans in the alcoves, the most Christian of Howadji, as he awaits the Houris, hears his heart repeating the mournful words of the Prophet "There can be but one Paradise, and mine must not be here!"

Yet as we lay, those May mornings, watching the gazelles, a year's life in Damascus promised the completest romance that the experience of this time could afford.

There would be no society, for technical "Society" is unknown in the East, and no impulse from the magnetic "spirit of the age." But all the rest could be supplied.

You would hear the hum of the West dying

away over the Mediterranean, into an incredible echo. Its remembered forms would glide, phantoms, across the luxurious repose of existence. Zeno would dwindle into a myth, modern times into a dream, and the fancied life of Epicurus would be the shadow of your own. Had Epicurus no reason? Was the legend of the lotus-eaters all a fable? Is the unimaginable imagery of opium dreams not worth the seeing?

Self-indulgent, wasteful, selfish, coward before the tyrannous realities of life, these are the reproaches that would disturb your dream.

Yet would I still exhort him who sincerely loves the lotus and thrives upon it-for such there areto dream that year in Damascus. For, would he then return, and paint that year for us, the dream would be justified and celebrated in pictures and songs.

Let Zeno frown. Philosophy, common sense, and resignation, are but synonyms of submission to the inevitable. I dream my dream. Men whose hearts are broken, and whose faith falters, discover that life is a warfare, and chide the boy for loitering along the sea-shore, and loving the stars.

But leave him, inexorable elders, in the sweet entanglement of the "trailing clouds of glory" with which he comes into the world. Have no fear that they will remain and dim his sight.

Those morning vapours fade away-you have learned it. And they will leave him chilled, philosophical, and resigned, in "the light of common day"-you have proved it. But do not starve him to-day, because he will have no dinner to-morrow. Like a poor country lad, who must go out to service in the dim and treacherous city, you will not suffer him to follow the watercourses, and know the flowers, and the sky, and the mountain landscape, in his first few years, lest their sublime memory should seduce him from his work, or sadden him in its doing. But the profoundest thinkers of you all, have discovered that an inscrutable sadness is the widest horizon of life, and the longing eye is more sympathetic with Nature, than the shallow stare of practical scepticism of truth and beauty.

But while we muse, the ladies have entered the court the family of a Jewish merchant, friend of our St. Peter—a mother and three daughters.

The mother is fat, and covered with brocades and cloths of gold, with bracelets, and necklaces, and rings; and her head is actually crusted with opals, pearls, rubies, carbuncles, and amethysts. She looks, as she stands in the sun, and conscious of the splendour of her appearance, as if she had just emerged from the bazaars, in which every merchant had thrown his choicest treasures at her